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Is the AdSense Effort Worth Your Time?

AdSense can be a fantastic moneymaker. There are many people who make thousands of dollars per month through AdSense alone. Hearing this may get you excited, and you may already have dollar signs in your eyes. But don’t get your hopes up just yet.

Although you’ve probably heard about people who bring in five or six figures per month with AdSense, you need to keep one very important thing in mind. In order to make that kind of money with AdSense, you need to have a ton of traffic.

In fact, most people who make more than $100 per month with AdSense either have a very large website with thousands of visitors per day, or they have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller websites.

For most people, AdSense may not be worth the effort to create sites only for promoting it. AdSense only pays a few cents for each click, depending on the keyword you target (some pay a lot more) and those few cents are a lot smaller than they were just a few years ago.

A few years ago, some people were getting several dollars per click for many keywords. These days, $1 clicks are relatively rare in most niches. Most clicks seem to be under $0.50 now, and smaller niches may experience clicks of only around $0.10 (or even less.)

In order to make $10 per day, at $0.10 per click you would need 100 clicks. If your click through ratio were 5%, you would need 2,000 visitors to your site every single day just to earn $10 per day.

For sites with very little traffic, you would have to have a really fantastic click through ratio in order to earn decent money with AdSense – or, choose highly competitive keywords that pay a lot, but are harder to rank high for in the search engines.

Some sites just naturally have traffic that doesn’t buy much as far as paid information, but they like to click through links to access free information. Webmasters who have sites that target the freebie seeking demographic should test AdSense links to see which type performs best.

If you’re running a site that has an extremely general audience, AdSense might also be a good alternative. AdSense is usually pretty good at delivering targeted ads. You can create thousands of content pages with AdSense links, place the code in your blogs, and watch your monthly earnings rise as you create more fodder for your readers.

If your only goal is to make money without becoming a product owner, then create a content-laden site that weaves affiliate links into the text and provides ample opportunities for clicks to AdSense links so that you can profit from the information you’re delivering.